


Feat of Engineering

by Distractivate



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: 2 boys! 1 pillow fort!, Babysitting, Except the kid is conveniently asleep in another room, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, M/M, Marriage, Pillow & Blanket Forts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:28:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22097926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Distractivate/pseuds/Distractivate
Summary: With Rollie off to bed and an hour left until the Schitts get home to relieve them from reluctant babysitting duty, David crawls into the pillow fort where Patrick fell asleep and fluff ensues, none of it about babysitting. Or kids.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 90
Kudos: 331





	Feat of Engineering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Likerealpeopledo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/gifts).



> I offered to write a quick prompt (fluffy pillow fort) for a friend who was having a rough day. More than a month ago. I should not make offers like this because I do not write anything, much less prompts, quickly. In any case, this is very very late, Likerealpeopledo, but I’ve so enjoyed all the other words we gave ourselves to write and read in the meantime. I hope you can bank this for the next rainy day.

It is quite a feat of engineering, David thinks, inspecting it from above. It’s constructed of every plush surface in the Schitt household except for the cushion on Roland’s easy chair because, “Sometimes it’s better not to know what lies beneath, Patrick.” The foam cushions canted at odd angles, pillows balanced on end and propped up by chairs and end tables, blankets stretched across the gaps, are part modern art, part patchworked haven, and part fantasy, especially considering this fortress now shelters his sleeping husband.

This is the third of three babysitting nights (they haggled down from six) that they owe Roland in exchange for him transporting the huppah to and from their wedding in his truck. He knows Patrick suggested the pillow fort tonight because experience has shown that collaborative activities keep both Rollie and David from becoming restless in the company of someone who does not generally share their more specific interests. But really . . . babysitting hasn’t been that bad. Having a thing to do with his husband now that Patrick _is_ his husband, a thing they didn’t do before, is welcome even. So little of their day-to-day has changed since their wedding, and these small dissonances help him frame the before and after, the changed-ness of marriage that he’d like to bask in now that he sees how good it is.

Speaking of husband, Patrick’s feet are poking out of the drawbridge—Rollie was not amenable to Patrick’s suggestion that drawbridges belong on castles, not forts, so drawbridge it is—toes curled in his white socks. David considers waking him but he’s been up late the last two nights finishing their quarterly tax filing for the store and they have at least an hour before Jocelyn and Roland get home. Patrick might as well sleep. The dishes are done and this structure before him is the only mess left to pick up.

David scans the room for something else to do. With the cushions and dining chairs in use for the fort, the only remaining seating is Roland’s chair and, well. He’d rather be on the floor which appears to at least be freshly vacuumed, so he shimmies under the quilted canopy.

It’s quite cozy, really, surrounded by softness that muffles the deep breaths of a sleeping Patrick. The multi-colored roofs and walls filter the living room lights down to an ethereal, shadowy glow. Patrick’s face is too slack to qualify as attractive, except David is no longer impartial about these things. The drooping lip can only divert David’s gaze for so long from the dark brush of lashes on his cheeks, so apparently there’s no state of Patrick that prevents David from marveling at every normal, outrageously beautiful inch of him.

Love is a physical thing, he’s learning. Beyond the other things it is—choices and promises and feelings—it’s a compulsion to draw in and reach out, to feel the one who is loved warm and safe against his body, to hold that choice, those promises dearly, dreadfully close in all of their permutations. David wants to hone the other ways he can show Patrick he is loved, but he offers it best bodily. A real and weighty thing he can pass with his hands and his eyes and his mouth. David has never been good at saying it, but he offers it—oh how he tries to offer it—and Patrick receives it like it’s a real thing, as structural and massive as it feels to David. Weightier than if he’d said it aloud.

Now, the choice to sit in the quiet and let Patrick sleep is a kind of physical love too, even though they aren’t touching. Because his fingers know the subtle bristle of Patrick’s body hair and his body craves the width and weight of him and he longs, always, for the sweet familiarity of being touched and touching someone who has chosen to love him not just as he is but as he will be. There’s something to be said for holding on to that longing, David thinks. For not letting it overtake him until the time is right. Something to be said for letting it build and build and build.

He’s not sure how long he’s been lying there when Patrick’s eyes blink open slowly. They track across Holly Schitt’s red and brown quilt overhead until they land on David. Patrick makes a deep throaty sound like his bearings found him instead of the other way around.

“Where’s Rollie?”

“I put him in his bed,” David says. Patrick’s sleepy eyes pop open at that.

“You did?”

“Yeah. He was trying to cuddle, so.” David thinks that should explain it but it clearly doesn’t, either because Patrick is still sleep-stupid or possibly the requisite time between unconsciousness and shit-giving is getting shorter with marriage. He looks at David with such a specific _and?_ expression that David is compelled to continue. “And I was getting sleepy and I know we’re not exactly trying to get hired again for this particular gig but . . . It just seemed like it would be not great for them to come home and find the three of us passed out and barricaded here among the family heirlooms and seat cushions.”

“I see.” He sees way too much in fact, David thinks, as he rubs sleep from his eyes. “You know, David, I have it on good authority we can make this a monthly thing if you’re going to miss the little guy.”

“I think I get enough of him the once or twice a month he’s abandoned in our store,” David replies. Patrick nods and laughs.

“Yeah, okay.”

“I do think we should get the recipe for that Dorito casserole, though,” David says. “It’s much better than it sounds, and it sounds fantastic.”

“Hmm.” Patrick scoots closer with a low chuckle so they are laying side-by-side. “You do love a good casserole.”

“I do.” Patrick’s eyes flick up to David’s smile, because those words _mean_ something now. Not the way they did before the wedding, when they were an exciting idea. Now every time he says them, no matter the context, David feels them swell up from deep inside himself. _I do._ He has to pause every time it happens, just in case there’s a day when he gets used to it. He wants to savor the feeling of that promise on his tongue. Patrick smiles back like he knows, and takes his hand, tracing the bones from his wrists up to the tips of his fingers, meditative and seductive.

“So how many of these do you think you’ve made in your lifetime?” David asks, surveying the snug assembly around them.

“Not that many, actually. I tended to part ways with my cousin Sean over creative differences before we finished any kind of make-believe stronghold.”

“Shocking.”

Patrick chuckles again and, having completed the outline of each of David’s fingers, lets David trace the bones on his hand in return.

“Listen, there’s a correct method and an incorrect method and you, of all people, should empathize with that.”

“I do.”

This time they trade knowing smiles, too bright to hide in the shadows.

“What about you? Did you build forts or castles or anything?”

“I did make everyone call me Prince David for a year but, no. Nothing like this. It’s stupid, maybe, but when you grow up in a mansion . . . I guess a fortress wasn’t the dream. When I played pretend it was from TV shows I liked. I’d watch _Full House_ or _The Wonder Years_ and just like, act out the scenes, I guess. Everyone on top of each other and in each other’s business. Seemed like the key to happiness. Now of course, having lived that, I know better.”

His voice falters just enough that Patrick turns. He is used to David’s creative reversals when his heart feels too full or too wounded, or in this case some of both. Patrick has the look he gets sometimes. Like he’d invent a time machine just to give David the past he thinks he deserves, even if it means he loses him to some other happiness along the way. They should talk about that sometime, the time-machine look. Patrick has enough of his own past to sort through without taking on David’s too.

“David,” he starts. He doesn’t finish.

“Tell me more about these forts. Did you dress up like a cowboy? Or oooh, a construction worker? Lil hard hat and boots?”

“No. I didn’t dress up much. Mostly stuck to my uniform of overalls and t-shirts.”

“I feel like I’m learning all these new things about you, but also, I feel like I already knew them. Try to surprise me.”

“Well I had a months-long fixation with my mother’s high heels. I would wad up socks behind my feet and try to wear them. Never got more than a meter or two in any direction but I was determined. Even sprained my ankle trying. My mom told my uncles what happened and they laughed and laughed and I guess I . . . Anyway I didn’t keep trying once it healed.”

David turns then, and even in the shaded light of the pillow fort he can see the pink in Patrick’s face. He kisses it, leaving a burst of white on his cheeks until the blush returns.

“The heels are surprising. You pushing yourself to the point of injury seems very on brand though.”

“Yeah,” Patrick admits. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth vanish with his smile and he looks away again, back at the pattern above them. “There are things like that. . . I don’t know, I just think about stories like that and think I should have _known_ , David. What the fuck took me so long to know?”

“Why should you have known? Because they were women’s shoes? Because that’s not even—”

“I know. It doesn’t really follow. At the time I thought I would show up the kids in my class by getting three inches taller overnight. But it just feels like if I could rearrange all these missed clues—maybe they aren’t even clues—just . . . stories. Events. Maybe in a slightly different order, I would have figured it out.”

If Patrick ever does make that time machine David is going to find a way to go back and release Patrick from all the what-ifs and maybe-clues that stumble around in his mind. But absent a plutonium-charged DeLorean, he can at least try to drag them out one gentle question at a time.

“It could have been a clue,” David says with a shrug. “Or it could have been just a healthy thing that kids do that something or someone made you ashamed of. Or it could have been just that you liked being taller. Or none of those things.”

“Yeah.”

“You know I have a nice pair of heeled Rick Owens boots you’re welcome to borrow,” David says with a grin.

“The silver ones?” Patrick’s jaw gets tight as he looks back up at the quilt overhead, and for a minute David worries he went too far.

“Yeah,” he answers tentatively.

“I tried them. I found them when I was unpacking in the new place and I . . . I dunno.” He shrugs, an awkward wiggle on the comforter underneath them, and David takes his hand again, weaving their fingers together.

“Okay,” David says, content to let that lie.

“They were kinda big,” Patrick says.

“My feet are bigger than yours.” Patrick catches David’s grin; it’s contagious.

“And really shiny. I don’t know if that’s my . . . I like knowing where I fit, and I don’t fit in those. But I dunno.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Maybe I don’t always want to fit, I guess? I mean I think I’d be taller than you in them. Maybe not taller than your hair but—”

“Mmhmm, I get it.” David says, exchanging teasing grins because at this point it’s no secret Patrick loves every inch of David, hair especially.

“Anyway I’d be eye-to-eye or a little above. And that would be . . . interesting maybe. Um. Hot.”

“ _Oh_ ,” David says with a grin. He has to stop the whir of possibilities from flying through his head because they are in the Schitts’ living room after all and he wouldn’t put it past Roland to have a nanny cam disguised as taxidermy. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I wore them around for a long time and I felt kind of awkward and clumsy. I think maybe I hoped you would find me or something. Like you seeing them would change . . . I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

David gives him a long look. “I’m here when you do, okay?” David whispers.

Patrick’s jaw finally unclenches and David sees the tension drain out of his body.

“Yeah, okay.”

David squeezes Patrick’s hand tighter and kisses his cheek and his temple and the hairline behind his ear and then one of his dimples and his nose and his eyelashes and then his temple again because that spot especially soothes him. He kisses faster and sloppier until Patrick is laughing and rolling towards him and mounting his own siege within the cushioned ramparts.

Patrick bumps one of the pillows as he rolls, and Grandma Schitt’s quilt billows down unsupported, threatening to suffocate them until David manages to lift enough of it with his palm to give them a little tent under which to breathe.

“You know, that probably wouldn’t have happened if you’d used your Cousin Sean’s pillow fort construction method,” David says. Patrick laughs and David kisses him right on his wide open mouth with a tease of his tongue. They’re both laughing into the kiss until it’s really just their faces smooshed together.

“It’s time to put the fort away anyway,” Patrick says with reluctance, and David thinks they need to do this more often, build their own enclave where it’s safe for the stories to fall out, held within the space they keep just for each other.

David resettles his head on the bunched up comforter below. He’s reluctant to go too, and he lets Patrick catch his eyes and hold them, to see the size and shape of his love if he wants to.

The light under the blanket is warm and deep red, and Patrick’s eyes look like garnets shining back at him. Patrick scoots closer and kisses him, a firm press against his lips, and whispers, “I love you, too.”


End file.
